Brigade Models

Previews, new releases, interesting stuff … and cakes !

Brigade Models - Previews, new releases, interesting stuff … and cakes !

Category Archives: Land Ironclads

Houston Gamers

Andy Bouffard of Houston Beer and Pretzel Gamers recently sent us a big bunch of photos of a recent combined arms Aeronef/Land Ironclads game.

What’s really impressive is the terrain setup – Andy bought a large batch of our 2mm buildings and fortifications to create a number of villages and towns. Although he ran out of time to completely finish off the painting, they still look pretty impressive – his approach of creating a series of tiles makes for a very flexible layout.

The group also have their own wargaming weekend coming up – Texas Broadside, which is run in the wardroom of the dreadnought-era battleship USS Texas !

Archie !

Two new releases in the Land Ironclads terrain range today – although they would also be extremely useful in Aeronef games. We have two anti-aircraft installations, a British ‘Archie’ tower (Archie was the WWI slang for anti-aircraft) and a German FlaK tower.

VLI-8017

VLI-8017 – German Flak Tower – £2.00
VLI-8018 – British Archie Tower – £2.00

VLI-8018

Although the models are labelled as ‘British’ and ‘German’ and come with the appropriate turrets by default, you do have the option of selecting other turrets (US, French, Russian etc) to customise them to your own fleet or army.

Salute Release Pricing

Ten days to Salute (aaaaghh !!!). So here we go … details and pricing for some of the Salute Releases. We’ll update this page with more as we go along so you may want to revisit again before the day.

British Spaceships
UPDATE – please note slight changes to destroyer designations

SFSP-101 – Fleet Pack (2 Churchill, 2 Heavy Cruiser, 2 A-class, 2 S-class) – £22.00
SFSP-103 – Pursuit Pack (2 Inflexible, 2 Town class, 2 W-class, 2 D-class, 3 L-class) – £22.00

SFS-100 – Churchill class Battleship – £7.50
SFS-101 – Inflexible class Battlecruiser – £6.00
SFS-120 – County class Heavy Cruiser – £3.50
SFS-121 – Town class Light Cruiser – £2.50
SFS-130 – A-class Fleet Destroyer – £1.25
SFS-131 – D-class Torpedo Destroyer – £1.25
SFS-132 – W-class Escort Destroyer – £1.25
SFS-140 – L-class Frigate – £0.75
SFS-150 – S-class Corvette – £0.25
SFS-170 – Manxman class MWV – £1.50

As I suspected he might, Phil popped up with yet another mould which I didn’t know about – so AmRep players now get a new fighter type, the Goshawk.

SFS-262 Goshawk fighter (x12) – £1.50

Squadron Commander

SCR-1401 – Pedang class Interceptor – £2.50
SCR-1402 – Kampak class Attack Fighter – £2.50
Both available in blister packs of four models for £9.00 including bases

Indonesian 6mm Vehicles

IC-1401 – Indonesian Army Group – £35.00
IC-1411 – Indonesian Tank Company – £11.50
IC-1412 – Indonesian Infantry Company – £12.00
IC-1413 -Indonesian Artillery Group – £14.50
IC-1414 – Indonesian Armoured Convoy – £10.75
All individual vehicles – £1.00

6mm Desert Buildings

B300-109 – Villa – £2.00
B300-111 – Loading Bay – £2.00
B300-122 – Small Tower #2 – £2.00
B300-123 – Twin-dome Buildings – £1.75
B300-124 – Large Villa – £2.25

15mm EuroFed SF
SF15-401 – Montsabert Tank (tank or support variant) – £8.00
SF15-403 – Tassigny APC (twin-MG, gatling or missile mount) – £8.00
SF15-403b – Tassigny Missile Vehicle – £8.00
SF15-403c – Tassigny Command Vehicle – £8.00

15mm German SF
SF15-301 – Thor Tank (tank, heavy support or twin support turrets) – £8.00
SF15-303 – Lynx APC (twin-MG or autocannon turret) – £8.00

15mm Buildings
B15-201 – Small advanced house- £7.00
B15-202 – Medium advanced house- £9.00

Land Ironclads
VLI-8017 – British Flak Tower – £2.00
VLI-8018 – German Flak Tower – £2.00

28mm Great War
GW28-1139 – Belgian Civilians/refugees (x6) – £6.50

Coastal Defences

It’s new releases time again. Today we have two new forts in the Land Ironclads range. These are based on the existing Sea Fort model which came out at the end of last year (which itself is based on the real-life Maunsell forts, examples of which can still be seen off the Kent and Essex coasts), but with one and four pillars respectively.

VLI-8008 – Single Pillar Sea Fort – £1.00
VLI-8009 – Four Pillar Sea Fort – £3.00

Four-Pillar Sea Fort

As with the two-legged version they don’t necessarily have to be used as sea forts, they’d look just as good as elevated land fortifications. The four-pillar one would make an excellent centre piece for a fort complex, surrounded by satellite one- and two-legged forts.

Single-Pillar Sea Fort

We’ve also updated the pages for all of the forts so that you can choose the type of turret they are supplied with. Not all of our turrets have the same peg-and-hole arrangement, so some turrets will require a little bit of snipping, filing or trimming to make them fit, but it does open up the option to make themed fortifications for different nationalities. Below you can see the original two-turret Sea Fort model fitted with Scandinavian heavy turrets instead of the default British ones.

Swedish

Full of Gas

We’ve added a couple of new bits to our Shapeways store recently, both to complement our 2mm buildings and fit in nicely with the Aeronef and Land Ironclad ranges.

First up is a gasholder (or gasometer). I’m not sure about other countries, but we have these all over the UK – as you come into Victoria train station in London there are several en-route next to the Thames, and another famous one is situated by the Oval cricket ground. Our model depicts two smallish ones, one full and the other about a third full.

The second model is of an airship mooring tower – based on real examples, scaled to be roughly the height of one of our Nef models on its flying stand. Painted in a red/white colour scheme, one or more of these would look great on a 2mm Aeronef landing field.

The lattice structure of models like these makes them ideal candidates for 3D printing, as they would be damn-near impossible to produce in resin or metal without making them a) in lots of pieces, or b) solid relief models, which just wouldn’t look as nice. If anyone is going to Salute and wants to get hold of either or both of these models, contact us in advance and we can order them in for you to avoid shipping charges.

2mm Middle Eastern Buildings

Today sees the release of three new sets in our ever-expanding Land Ironclads 2mm buildings range. This time we’ve moved to the Middle-East, allowing you to fight the campaigns of the Sudan, the North-West Frontier. They would serve equally well for WWI and WWII Western Desert games, or even as far the as Arab-Israeli Wars, the Gulf War or the Liberation of Kuwait.


VLI-8014 – Middle-Eastern Village (x20) – £5.00


VLI-8015 – Mosque (x2) – £2.00


VLI-8016 – Small Desert Fort – £1.50

Large scale Land Ironclad!

Occasionally here at Brigade Towers we’ve discussed the idea of upscaling some of our Land Ironclads models to a larger scale. Naturally these chats come to nothing for a plethora of reasons (mostly apathy it must be said).

Until now that is…..

Child number two, eldest son and heir has just turned ten and requested a birthday cake in the shape of a tank. Fantastic I thought. What sort of tank would a ten year old child like to have? Well obviously a Brigade Models Brunel war tractor of course.

Oddly enough the Brunel war tractor cake doesn’t seem to be commercially available (surely a massive gap in the confectionary market) so I had to make my own.

So after about three hours of cutting and icing she was finished.

Brunel-3

I’ll admit I did cheat and bought the cake since I didn’t have time to do the baking. I also decided that trying to add scale rivets to a cake was a little too much as well.

Brunel-2

In normal service British land ironclads would be painted either standard grey or a deep bronze green. However I decided to model mine in the “dress colours” as used on the vehicles that were involved in the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.

Brunel-1

And the most valuable lesson I learnt whilst making the cake? Don’t give in to your children and let them spend the evening baking cupcakes which means that you don’t start until nearly midnight. Making a cake until three in the morning is not particularly good idea. In fact its a very stupid idea.

And fortunately the small child seemed impressed with his cake. That’s lucky.

 

 

More 2mm Buildings

This weekend we’re releasing more models in our remarkably popular 2mm buildings range. This time we have a pack of 16 sets of terraced houses; there are four different types with some minor variations.

VLI-8012

VLI-8012 – 2mm Terraced Houses (x16) – £6.00

In addition, we have these:

poplar-1

No, not silver torpedoes ! They are in fact poplar trees. I’ve seem some excellent 2mm trees make from pipe cleaners (bump chenille) and round-headed drawing pins (check out the galleries in the 2mm Wargaming group on Facebook), but poplar trees are slightly tricker – but they look very distinctive in rural and farming areas.

VLI-8013 – 2mm Poplar Trees (x36) – £2.50

Just to show what can be done with them, I started by basing some on a short length (1″) of 1x4mm plastic strip. I drilled five 1mm holes with a pin vise and superglued the poplars in place (as you can see, they come on a variety of sizes – height and girth).

poplar-2

After a quick spray undercoat, I painted the trunks brown and the foliage dark green followed by a quick drybrush of a lighter colours. This brings out the texture and they already look pretty good, and would be perfectly usable in this state.

poplar-3

Then I coated them in PVA and dipped them in a dark flock – Woodland Scenics fine turf

poplar-4

Not bad for about 10 mins work (excluding drying time)

poplar-5

In the nick of time !

We did promise to try and get some more 2mm buildings out by the end of the sale, and by the skin of our teeth we’ve managed it ! Both the farms and factories are now on the website ready for purchase, with a couple of days to go until the end of the year.

The farms set consists of an assortment of buildings including farmhouses, windmills, barns and oast, while the industrial buildings set has a variety of factories, a pumping station, hydroelectric power station (yes, they had them in the Victorian era), a large warehouse, water tower and various sheds and workshops. The chimneys are interchangeable between the various factories to allow for even more customisation.

On the Sixth Day of Christmas

On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me …
Middle-eastern buildings;
D6
D6-1
D6-2
More teeny-tiny 2mm buildings; this time middle-eastern buildings including mosques (with interchangeable minarets) and small forts. Due for release in February.
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